Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. He co-chairs the American Bar Association Committee on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and serves on the program committee of National Robotics Week.

The most interesting aspect of cyberspace is not what happens for a time to its visitors. It’s not the absence of regulation nor the presence of perfect regulation; it’s not the staggering variety of content nor the sudden arbitrariness of geography; it’s not the constant threat of surveillance nor the occasional absence of accountability. The most interesting aspect of cyberspace flows from its status as an engine of realization: cyberspace widens the range of what we think of as possible. The Web is home to phenomena that never quite happened before—not because the technology was untenable, but because no one thought to do it. The importance of cyberspace is not what occurs to you when you visit; it’s what occurs to you.

If you’ve visited Google’s physical campus in Mountain View, you likely noticed that the sign in procedure amounts to a click-wrap. Google requires that you accept a non-disclosure agreement, presented on monitors by the front door, before it will print you a visitor pass. It occurred to the Internet giant that it could treat its campus like an Internet service by requiring visitors to click-through a terms of use at the entry portal. This generates a record that you either agreed to play by the rules, or you were trespassing.

826 National is an incredible non-profit dedicated to improving writing and other skills among children ages to six to eighteen. A few days after the election of Barack Obama, 826 centers in seven cities asked children to offer advice to the new president. The result was the deservedly celebrated book Thanks And Have Fun Running The Country.

As you might imagine, this book is a major tour de cute. One 9-year-old in Los Angles opines that if he were president, he “would help all nations, even Hawaii.” A Seattle 7-year-old suggests that President Obama “turn on the heater, so it won’t be cold.” In short: awwwww.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I came across the following suggestion from a Boston 12-year-old: “Dear, Barack Obama, … You should also build cameras all around our city to find out who is breaking the law, and also in movie theatres so we can tell who is making illegal copies.”

Wait, what??? Did the DOJ and RIAA have a child together? The rest of this writer’s suggestions are eminently reasonable—more power efficient cars, less smoking, and the like. Still, it’s not often that you see a 12-year-old proponent of ubiquitous surveillance! Read more » about Have Fun Watching The Country

The ACLU of Northern California has published a primer (PDF) on the advantages to businesses of good privacy and free speech practices. The primer assembles many real-world instances of harms and benefits to companies due to their choices around user privacy and value speech. Congratulations to Nicky, Chris, and no doubt others in putting this together. Read more » about Privacy And Free Speech (ACLU No. Cal. Primer)

“Robots again.” That’s how federal appellate judge Alex Kozinski begins his dissent from the Ninth Circuit’s decision not to rehear Wendt v. Host International. The “robots” refers to animatronic replicas of Cliff and Norm from the TV series Cheers built by an airport bar chain as a gimmick. The “again” refers to the earlier case of White v. Samsung, where Samsung ran ads depicting a robot version of Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White with the tag line “Longest-running game show, 2012 A.D.” She sued. (To her credit, however, Ms. White kept her head. She did not turn into a car and drive over to Samsung headquarters, as was no doubt her first instinct.)

People suing over robot versions of themselves is just one of the ways robots make ordinary cases more interesting. As personal robotics moves toward the multibillion-dollar market Bill Gates and some analysts predict, we are likely to see more—and more interesting—robot-driven litigation. What follows is a little tour of robot case law to date. Read more » about A Short Tour Of Robot Case Law

Pages

In a fresh and recent whitepaper, Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes and law student Jodie Liu turn the standard privacy argument on its head: as they see it, many supposed threats to our privacy actually benefit it. Read more » about Siri Is Judging You

The Federal Aviation Administration announced its proposal this morning for what rules should govern small unmanned aerial systems, meaning drones 55 pounds or lighter. We do not know how long it will take for the rules to go into effect. When they do, the new rules will permit vastly more drone use in the United States, bringing us closer into line with other countries where drones can be commercially operated today. Read more » about How The FAA's Proposed Drone Rules Will Affect What You Care About

Pages

"An ethicist says that now is the time to ponder the enigmatic questions of cyber law: “Robotic systems accomplish tasks in ways that cannot be anticipated in advance; and robots increasingly blur the line between person and instrument,” says Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. If, in the future, a demonstrably sentient machine claims the right that humans have to procreate, or build copies of itself, who can say nay?Read more » about Robot rights rule!

A Brave New Era? Or, Back to the Future? Are we in 1934? 1993? Or, 2015? The FCC’s order on the open internet – What did the FCC really do and what will it mean for internet service providers, online music and video companies, e-commerce companies, transit providers and consumers? Read more » about Pacific Northwest Chapter Luncheon

"Calo recently signed an open letter that detailed his and others’ concerns over AI’s rapid progress. The letter was published by the Future of Life Institute, a research organization studying the potential risks posed by AI. The letter has since been endorsed by scientists, CEOs, researchers, students and professors connected to the tech world. Read more » about A responsible approach to artificial intelligence

Billions of dollars are pouring into the latest investor craze: artificial intelligence. But serious scientists like Stephen Hawking have warned that full AI could spell the end of the human race. How seriously should we take the warnings that ever-smarter computers could turn on us? Our expert witnesses explain the threat, the opportunities and how we might avoid being turned into paperclips. Read more » about Should We Fear Artificial Intelligence?

""One of the problems with the capability of a company to personalize the terms on which is offers you services and the price is this information asymmetry. You don’t know when they’re doing it," says Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor who studies privacy rights."

"Ryan Calo, Assistant Law Professor at the University of Washington and an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, joined us to talk about his vision for a commission compromised of technologists, engineers, and scientists: